On Tue, 8 Sep 2009, Fernando Gadea wrote:
So they say that good piano players play with the whole body (same for guitar or any physical instrument, I guess).
Is it because it makes the music any better, or because what musicians are after is not just the music but also the dance that a musician makes with the instrument?
Art is suposed to be a free environment, meaning that it should be guided or conditioned only by the artist.
According to whom?
If you answer yes to the third, the probabilities are that your mind is twisted after years of taking drugs, and maybe it was already twisted before you studied art or started taking drugs. Sorry, I was joking...
Drugs usually come relatively late in the picture. They don't tend to make art more twisted, just more defective. They also don't have much to do with being twisted.
Of course in these three questions I was only having fun while being retoric, because relativity dismantles concepts as "making a difference", "quality", "being emotionally involved" and even "academic" or "popular" (history shows lots of examples that would complicate the difference between the last two).
Dismantling and complicating are not the same thing. Being conscious of the relativity doesn't make those concepts less important and it doesn't break them. It just breaks down a lot of talk that uses those concepts: that which is vague, makes undue assumptions, etc.
At the end, anything could be poetic, as it mostly depends on who we are at that right moment. It ends as a matter of self-perception.
Right.
And as perception is not transferable, neither is poetic or aesthetic experience.
Well, despite our frustrations with it, plain talking goes a long way transferring a lot of perception, experience, and other ideas. Calling perception non-transferable comes from either taking conversation as so much for granted that it doesn't count in the picture, or being very pessimistic about how well it can be effectively transferred.
That gives us a lot of possibilities, none better than other, only differents.
It's only all the same if you just don't care about the possibilities (or if you are trying to be diplomatic). In practice, people get involved in aesthetics because they are passionate about them, and they judge a lot. There is no absoluteness, no central authority, but there's still a lot of judgements and impressions of what is better and what is worse, and that's a necessity.
It is also supposed that someone not educated would be more able to find poetic in anything, because for him anything would be different from anything he knows.
People don't enter university as blank slates.
That is why we commonly despise the creations of early students, forgetting that in history teachers stole several times the concepts of students that "weren´t clever enough to realize the jewel they had in hands".
Students are at a disadvantage here. They are not knowledgeable in the research-wise artistic discourse of profs, that is what profs are bathing in constantly, and so they don't know what is valuable to the profs. What is valuable to the profs doesn't make much sense to an outsider. It's probably more whim-oriented than most any other discipline (?).
it was an interesting read.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.cawrote:
On Tue, 8 Sep 2009, Fernando Gadea wrote:
So they say that good piano players play with the whole body (same for
guitar or any physical instrument, I guess).
Is it because it makes the music any better, or because what musicians are after is not just the music but also the dance that a musician makes with the instrument?
Well, the word dance proposes a different kind of engagement to the kinds of actions we make when we perform, although it keeps the idea that the whole body resonates with sound (in sort of a more overt way than listening). I think what musicians are after is to forge a 'craft' or 'technique' that allows them to control sound as they intend to hear them; to attain the ability to control minute details according to what you are hearing as an almost immediate response. and continuing the dance resonance idea, it is somehow reversed: it is to want sound to resonate to our bodies. and to follow the feedback idea: it is to want sound to resonate to our bodies to resonate with sound to resonate to our bodies,,,,loop
Physical interaction is just the common way we interact with the world most of the time, and so it makes sense to want to control sound in that way too and it's just harder with computers, because we usually lack the right interfaces to do it. I think most of the appeal of live performances with physical interaction is that we share the same kind of bodies and perceptual systems and so we can relate to the way sounds are being produced/controlled.
finally on the things about the whole body. well, it is hard to imagine a body which is separate than any of its parts or of the mind itself.
I'm writing on a related subject so comments are appreciated...
nice debate,
J
--- On Mon, 9/21/09, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca Subject: [PD] "computer music" WAS: Re: Pd at a livecoding event on the BBC To: pd-list@iem.at Date: Monday, September 21, 2009, 10:52 PM
On Tue, 8 Sep 2009, Fernando Gadea wrote:
So they say that good piano players play with the
whole body (same for guitar or any physical instrument, I guess).
Is it because it makes the music any better, or because what musicians are after is not just the music but also the dance that a musician makes with the instrument?
Hm...you're obviously starting with a definition of music that precludes whatever you mean by "the dance that a musician makes," but I don't know why you think that's the case. I think there's a pedagogical value in thinking of music as a kind of self-contained entity that's distinct from gesture and theatre and programs, but outside of teaching it usually ends up sounding like a self-serving idealogy that reinforces what one is already interested in and dismisses what one wishes to ignore.
For example, try complementing a composer by referring to their piece in literary terms: allusions to the canon, narrative plot devices, characterization, etc. Often I think you will find quite a (hopefully polite and probably quite subtle) dance, the upshot of which will be a) that the composer's intentions were not programmatic, and b) there are deeper, more substantial things happening that don't depend on *extra* musical considerations.
But where does the "the music" begin and "the dance" end?
And wherever it is for you, what stops you from making an even sharper,
more restrictive separation than that one?
-Jonathan
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Jaime Oliver -
Jonathan Wilkes -
Mathieu Bouchard